This article first appeared in Vanity Fair on September 30, 2014.
Matt Bai’s buzzed-about new book points to Gary Hart’s sex scandal as the moment American political reporting went tabloid. In an adaptation from her new memoir, Daring: My Passages, Gail Sheehy, who chronicled Hart’s campaigns for Vanity Fair, writes that it provided the public with an essential window into a guarded presidential candidate’s character.
Gary Hart must be smiling.
Before the 1988 presidential primaries, Hart was the presumptive Democratic front-runner, a former senator from Colorado who’d run a star-making insurgency against Walter Mondale three years earlier. Then, in May 1987, a Miami Herald stakeout caught the married Hart sharing time in his Washington, D.C., town house with Donna Rice, a sometime Miami model and pharmaceutical sales rep, who would prove to be the last of the candidate’s extramarital flings on the campaign trail. Hart became the first presidential candidate in U.S. history to have his campaign torpedoed by a sex scandal.
The unique distinction has made him both a punch line and cautionary tale of political hubris for the better part of three decades. But in a September 21 cover story in The New York Times Magazine, Matt Bai did his part to rehabilitate the failed presidential candidate, after 27 years of shamed obscurity. The story, which arrived with the cover line “Original Sin,” located Hart’s downfall as “the very moment when the walls between the public and private lives of candidates, between politics and celebrity, came tumbling down forever.” Bai, a Yahoo News national political columnist, blames the prurient press for breaking those walls. (The piece is a prelude to his book All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, which will be released by Knopf tomorrow.) Bai concludes that the Herald’s reporting took the country downhill into the current “dispiriting state of our politics.”
In truth, Gary Hart’s double life provided me my first opportunity to write a character study that lifted the barrier between a politician’s public persona and the secret lies of the psyche. I wrote about him for this magazine twice, first in 1984, when he was a star on the rise, and again in 1987, after his political career had fallen apart. (Read the later story, “The Road to Bimini,” from the September 1987 issue of Vanity Fair.) As I wrote then, the issue with Gary Hart was not adultery. The issue was character. Bai’s piece reflects the old-guard journalistic practices—maintained by an almost exclusively male press corps—that viewed any reporting on personal behavior or psychological ob-servations as inappropriate; “just the facts, ma’am.”
Character study looks at the pattern of behavior that repeats at pivotal turning points of a person’s life. It requires in-depth reporting. But a character portrait can be more valu-able than a policy analysis in predicting the kind of leader a candidate will be. Issues are today. Character is what was yesterday and what will be tomorrow.
It was Richard Nixon’s character, not his policies (which even some liberals applauded) that brought him down. It was Lyndon Johnson’s character, a lifelong propensity for ly-ing, that took him down once his perfidy on Vietnam was exposed. It would be Bill Clinton’s character, not his agenda, that opened him to impeachment.
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Thirty years ago, in his first presidential run, Gary Hart was the Gentleman Caller of American politics, a handsome Colorado senator who first burst onto the national stage in 1984 with an upset victory in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. Suddenly, he became the illusory romantic figure with “new ideas” who was on his way to beating the old-guard vice president, Walter Mondale.
I began studying Gary Hart in ’84 by interviewing at least 40 sources in some way con-nected to my subject. I traced his childhood in the punitive Church of the Nazarene, a fundamentalist sect that echoed his mother’s religiosity, forbidding all sentient pleas-ures: no dancing, no movies, no listening to the radio, and, of course, no drinking or premarital sex. I learned that once he graduated from Nazarene College, he went over the wall, leaving his wife and family to volunteer with George McGovern’s campaign, where he reportedly reveled in becoming a reckless lothario.
Hart had been quoted as saying, “I’m an obscure man, and I intend to remain that way. I never reveal who I really am.” Interviews with his political associates elicited the same refrain: “When you find out who Gary Hart really is, let me know.”
While the traveling press was tracking his daily public appearances, I went to a Colorado sweat lodge to meet up with Marilyn Youngbird, a beautiful Native American woman who claimed to be Hart’s “spiritual adviser.” She told of their intimacy at a Comanche ceremony.
“It was sensual,” she said. “They brushed the front and back of our bodies with eagle feathers.”
It sounded to me like the fantasy of a besotted groupie. But when I later interviewed Hart, I passed on a message she had asked me to deliver, telling him to take time for a spiritual-healing ceremony.
“Do you know Marilyn,” he said excitedly. “She’s my spiritual adviser.”
Stunned, I repeated a prophecy Marilyn told me: The Great Spirit had chosen Gary Hart to save nature from destruction.
“I know. She keeps telling me that.”
“Do you believe it?”
“Yes.”
Of all the people I interviewed, including Hart’s wife, Lee, Marilyn Youngbird was the only person who said she had been able to get close to Hart. Clues abounded that he was a divided man: saintly visionary and sinning libertine.
The first story I wrote about him for Vanity Fair, “The Hidden Hart,” in ’84, kicked up speculation in the press about Hart’s “flake factor.” Hart’s people made every effort to discredit me. Still, Mondale’s campaign backed away from any interest in Hart as a run-ning mate that year.
Three years later, Hart’s long-rumored infidelity came to light when he was confronted by The Miami Herald. Hart denied any immoral conduct and stalked off the public stage in furious defiance. But the apparent tragedy of this charismatic new-generation politi-cian continued to perplex the American public. Network pundits reminded us nightly that we had lived through the adulterous presidencies of F.D.R. and J.F.K. So, was Hart the victim of a gutter press?
In fact, Hart had gravitated since ’84 toward hedonists such as Warren Beatty, who be-came his sidekick and used fixers to find him girls. That led him to Turnberry Isle, the Miami resort where Lynn Armandt, proprietor of the on-site bikini store, was more than happy to provide girls like Rice for cruises on a pleasure vessel named Monkey Business.
Hart admitted to me that he carried a goodly share of Protestant guilt. His childhood pastor in Ottawa, Kansas, had made sure it would pursue him forever. The Reverend Earl Copsey told me that Gary Hartpence, as he was known until his 1961 name change, was a dead soul as far as the church was concerned. The pastor pinpointed the exact date on which that death occurred, September 20, 1968, “when he left the church to go back out to the world of sin.”
I was convinced that in Hart’s second presidential race, it was not a question of if he would destroy himself, but of when. And when his double life imploded, my reporting had shown me why. In “The Road to Bimini,” I traced his inevitable trajectory. He could not be both worthy and sinful. He needed to be caught.
This article was adapted from the author’s memoir, Daring: My Passages, published this month by William Morrow.
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